Fritinancy

Fictional Brand Name: Ablixa

Side Effects, the new film from Steven Soderbergh that’s now in theaters, is a twisty thriller, more gris than noir, in which almost every character is taking mood-adjusting prescription drugs. Beta blockers, Adderall, Paxil, Effexor, Celexa, Zoloft, Wellbutrin—in the film, these real-world drugs are casually discussed at cocktail parties and liberally dispensed by doctors for pre-interview jitters, anxiety, the blues, you name it. (Another recent release, Silver Linings Playbook, also features a memorable conversation about name-brand meds. Is this the dawn of Cinema Pharma?)

The pivotal pill in Side Effects, however, is an invented one. “Ablixa” (generic name “alipazone”) is introduced as an antidepressant with an upbeat slogan—“Take Back Tomorrow”—and some worrisome side effects that include confusion, suicidal thoughts, and sleepwalking (and also, as it turns out, sleep-table-setting, sleep-loud-music-playing, and sleep-vegetable-slicing).

To say anything more about the plot would spoil the pleasures of this grim yet exhilarating movie, so I’ll stick to the Ablixa story, which contains some surprises of its own.

The Names of Drugs

“The simple names favored by the alternative medicine community provide an illusion of safety and comprehensibility that the chemical names can’t match. Another common chemical name for methotrexate is amethopterin, which comes from the roots meth, Greek for wine, which I might stretch to spirits, and pterin, Greek for feathers. And naproxen is a chemical analog of salicylic acid, which can be extracted from willow bark. I strongly suspect that if Shepherd’s rheumatologist had called what he prescribed spirits of feathers and an extract of willow, rather than methotrexate and naproxen, Meadows would have been happier.”

-- From “Don’t Take Medical Advice from the New York Times Magazine,” by Michelle M. Francl, a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr University. Francl is responding to an article in the Times by Susannah Meadows about Meadows’s son, Shepherd, who had juvenile idiopathic  arthritis; Francl calls Meadows’s preference for “alternative” medicines “molecular paranoia” and “chemophobia.”

The Grift That Keeps On Grifting

From a November 29 post by Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Beast:

I am now on a new drug called Egrifta which targets HIV-related lipodystrophy, i.e. strange fat accumulation around your internal organs, by triggering an increase in your own body's production of growth hormone.

 

Egrifta (“eh-GRIF-tuh”) injectable prescription medicine from Theratechnologies. Generic name: tesamorelin.

 

Interesting name, Egrifta. What’s the story behind it? I have no idea. But let’s consider:

Grifter: “Confidence trickster,” 1906, carnival and circus slang, probably an alteration of grafter (see graft (n.2); also cf. grift). Gradually extended to “any non-violent criminal.” (Online Etymology Dictionary)

 

 

The Grifters (1990)

 

Grift: (slang) 1. Money made dishonestly, as in a swindle. 2. A swindle or confidence game. (American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition)

 

 

Griftopia, by Matt Taibbi (Random House, 2010)

 

With all that rich source material, you’d think the marketing copy could have written itself. But the cupboard is bare—no tagline, no ads. So let’s, as a public service, fix that.

Maybe a sly double-entendre:

• What’ve you got to lose?

Or a cruder double-entendre:

• Skimming the fat since 2011.

Or we could really get into the carnival spirit:

• See the bottle? Under the middle shell. Watch the middle shell. Keep watching the middle shell. Don’t take your eyes off the middle shell. Where’s the bottle now?

On the other hand, maybe we should take a closer look at that “e” prefix:

• I write to you from exile, the daughter of a deposed Nigerian prince…

Eh, griftas—over to you!

UPDATE via email from Dan Freiberg: “You take it. It takes you.”

To Sleep, Perchance to Zzz

Remember when Z was the official letter of hip-hop and all things outlaw? As in Bratz, Starz, and Boyz II Men? And how that got kind of tired? Now Z has reclaimed its role as the official symbol of sleep, as we see here.

ZzzQuil is a new nighttime “sleep aid” from Vicks, the maker of NyQuil cough medicines. According to the website, “ZzzQuil contains diphenhydramine HCI, which is a big word for a small compound that helps you sleep.” The flavor is called Warming Berry, which is obviously very different from Cool Berry.

There are no pronunciation tips on the site, so it’s going to be tough to ask for it by name, as cats used to do with Meow Mix. Is it zee-zee-zee-quil, zees-quil, or [buzzing sound]-quil? In the UK is it zed-zed-zed-quil?

Multiple Zs have been an onomatopoetic representation of snoring, and by extension of sleep, for many decades. The OED’s first citation is from 1924. “Catching some Zs” to mean “getting some sleep”—a U.S. colloquialism, according to the OED—dates back to the early 1960s.

Here’s another brand that uses multiple Zs to indicate restfulness:

 

 

The E-Zzz Sleep pillowcase is made of cotton flannel and has a flap that drapes over your face. The company says the product “solves a problem, fulfills a need, makes sense, looks and feels good, is new and unique and makes a dramatic difference in your comfort and the quality of sleep.” Probably not recommended for insomniacs with a suffocation phobia.

 

 

There are at least four live trademarks in the U.S. for Z-Tech, but I found only one for ZZZ Tech: ZZZ Tech Sleep Lab, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. “Catch your ZZZ’s – count your blessings,” reads a caption on the website.

 

Bedzzz, on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, appears to be dormant. The declining Zs may be a tipoff.

 

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ZzzQuil via The Impulsive Buy.

 

June Linkfest

Each week, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog posts a Twitter contest with the hashtag #tnyquestion. The June 1 contest asked readers to contribute a new word to the English language; the results have been compiled in a handsome PDF dictionary. The June 8 contest—invent a corporate-literary mashup—resulted in more than a thousand responses, including “Of Mice and Mennen,” “A Tale of Two Citis,” and (from yours truly) “50 Shades of Grey Poupon.” Winners revealed here. (Note: I cannot claim credit for “Pninterest”; I only retweeted it.)

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It’s Silicon Valley’s next hot IPO. It’s called Ponzify. What could possibly go wrong? (Satire alert.)

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The ass-fication of American branding continues apace: “Six print ads that use ass imagery (not actual asses, sorry) to sell stuff.” Safe for work, but may provoke loud groans.

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Steve Jobs really, really liked the name “MacMan.” He lost the battle; Apple won the war.

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Go ahead and say “the Internets,” you irony-overloaded hipster, but never, ever say “vinyls.”

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You don’t need a designer when the copy’s this good: a Flickr set of copywriter Joe D’Allegro’s signs for Synergy Fitness in Jersey City. (Via AdFreak.)

 

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Glossed Over saves you the annoyance of reading the July issue of Glamour. “Less than zero: Likelihood that I will ever use Glamour’s Word of the Month, ‘frizzle’.” 

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What not to name your spaceship. (By the way, did you know that Greece’s Olympic Airlines was originally called Icarus? What were they thinking?)

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Derek Lowe, who blogs about science and the pharmaceutical industry for In the Pipeline, asks: “What’s the biotech/pharma company out there with the worst name” (other than Abbott Labs’ new AbbVie)? His commenters gleefully ante up.

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David Crystal’s long list of words first used by Charles Dickens includes kibosh, unyielding, dustbin, devil-may-care, flummox, and sawbones.

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More from Crystal: “Dickens worked at his names: he tried out Martin Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig, before ending up with Martin Chuzzlewit.”

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The Obama 2012 campaign slogan is “Forward,” but Americans would rather go in the opposite direction, argues advertising creative director Judith Grey.

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“My great-grandfather started this business with one simple mission that we abandoned decades ago.”

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A defense of undictionaried (aka madeupical) words by lexicographer and Wordnik founder Erin McKean.

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Why is it the United States and the Netherlands … but just plain Ukraine? Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explains to the BBC.

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“Logic is the enemy of a successful brand name,” writes veteran marketing strategist Al Ries. Example: “Search.com is shorter (one syllable instead of two), more memorable and a lot more credible than Google.com. Should Google.com change its name to Search.com?” (Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

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An evil spelling test, courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

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Naming your company is just the first step. Catchword Branding lists five factors to consider when launching a company name.

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Grexit, Geuro, neuro, and other words spawned by the Greek debt crisis. (And yes, that is the 84,573rd sighting of a “What’s in a Name?” headline.) (Via @WordLo.)

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Prosign, rag-chewing, umpty, and other telegraph lingo. (And check out the link to more telegraph and radio slang.)

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Twitter’s Fail Whale has spawned a menagerie of social-media fail pets. Mike Pope provides a taxonomy.

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And as long as we’re on the subject, I’m loving these social media propaganda posters by Etsy vendor Aaron Wood. Available individually or as a compilation. Via @mightyredpen.

Big Companies, Bad Names

Two global companies, both in the Chicago area, announced the names of spinoff brands yesterday. That’s two opportunities to observe that it isn’t only small, underfunded startups that make bad naming decisions.

Exhibit A: Health-care company Abbott Laboratories will name its new pharmaceutical company AbbVie. According to the Abbott press release, AbbVie “is derived from a combination of Abbott and ‘vie’, which references the Latin root ‘vi’ meaning life.” Richard A. Gonzalez, who will become the chairman and CEO of the new company, explained: “The ‘vie’ calls attention to the vital work the company will continue to advance to improve the lives of people around the world.”

“Vie” and “vital”? So AbbVie must be pronounced with a long I sound in the second syllable, right? Wrong! The first sentence of the press release has a phonetic cue in brackets: “Abb-vee.”

Which leads me to repeat a general rule of naming: When you have to provide a pronunciation guide, you’re acknowledging that your name is confusing. Not a promising start for a business.

AbbVie has another liability: that pile-up of plosives consonants [see comment from @kirinqueen] in the middle of the name. It’s difficult to say “AbbVie” without stuttering—and all that occlusion suggests a slow, sputtering business.

Exhibit B: Kraft Foods, which calls itself a “global snacks powerhouse”—it’s the parent company of Oreo, Cheez Whiz, Jell-O, and many other brands—is splitting into two companies, a North American grocery foods business and a global snack foods business. This week it announced that the snack business will be called Mondelez International.

Perhaps you, like I, had this initial response: “World of lesbians?”

My second inclination was to start humming “On the Road to Mandalay.”

But no. Once again, the press release has to come to the rescue: the name, we’re informed, is to be pronounced “moan-dah-LEEZ.” Indeed, in the headline, there’s a macron—a short horizontal line—over the second E, indicating a long-vowel sound. (There’s no equivalent hint for the O in “Mon-.”) The macron appears nowhere else in the press release, nor does it appear in the many news stories about the name announcement.

Another general rule of naming: If you need diacritical marks to clarify the pronunciation of your name, it isn’t clear enough on its own. A corollary: Print and online media won’t bother to use your fancy accent marks.

I am unsurprised to learn that this name resulted from an employee contest. More than 1,000 employees around the world submitted more than 1,700 names, according to the company. (If Mondelez was the best of the bunch, I don’t want to think about the worst.*) According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the “inspiration” for Mondelez came from two submissions, one from Europe and one from North America.

A third general rule of naming: Employee contests may be good for morale, but they rarely result in effective names—unless your employees are professional name developers.

The Kraft press release provides some background:

“Monde” derives from the Latin word for “world," and “delez” is a fanciful expression of “delicious.”

(I love this comment on WSJ.com: “Mondelez Industries – Isn’t that where George Constanza claimed to work as a latex salesman?”**)

Fortunately for us consumers, “Mondelez” won’t appear on packaging: it’s a corporate name only. The grocery unit will be named Kraft Foods Group.

These aren’t the first instances of Abbott and Kraft making dubious name decisions. I recently wrote about two confusingly named (but not competing) Kraft Foods brands, Velveeta and belVita. And in 2009 I wrote about the Abbott Labs drug Humira, which the company insists is pronounced “hu-MARE-ah.”

Thanks to Deborah Schneider of the Kineo Group in Chicago for tips about both stories. Both Deborah and I are quoted in an article about the new names published in today’s Chicago Tribune.

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* UPDATE: According to Alan Brew, who blogs at Name Droppings, one of the also-rans was Tfark. That’s “Kraft” spelled backward.

** It was Vandelay.

Naming Notes

Items that have caught my attention in recent weeks:

I’ve been enjoying the new HBO series “Enlightened,” starring (and co-created by) Laura Dern, who plays Amy, a volatile, self-destructive, yet somehow sympathetic corporate executive who has a screaming meltdown in the office, submits to mellowing-out therapy, and manages to get herself rehired. The naming tidbit? The company Amy works for is called Abaddon Industries, pronounced in the show with emphasis on the first syllable, something like “Avedon.” The company nameplate is featured prominently on screen, but it didn’t ring any bells with me and it isn’t explained in the episodes I’ve seen. Wall Street Journal culture critic Michael Judge filled me in. Abaddon, he writes, “is the real co-star of ‘Enlightened’”:

The name is taken from Revelation 9:11: “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon...” Our heroine, it becomes clear, aims to slay this corporate beast.

Possibly relevant: The other co-creator of the series, Mike White, is the son of Mel White, an evangelical pastor who ghostwrote the autobiographies of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham—and then came out as gay, switched to a progressive Christian denomination, and eventually married his partner.

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Here’s what a lot of us want to know about Downy UNSTOPABLES, “the in wash [sic] scent booster for clean breeze [sic—why does Downy hate hyphens?] freshness that just won’t quit”: Is the spelling error intentional? Or is it a case of “We know we goofed but the labels were already on the presses so maybe no one will notice,” like Seagate’s “Your On” slogan (reported here in 2007)? Did Procter & Gamble, which owns Downy, spend so much money hiring Amy Sedaris as spokeslaundress that nothing was left in the budget for proofreading?

Don’t believe me? See for yourself. One P.

Hat tip to Grammarsnark, and special thanks to Amy Reynaldo for the nudge.

UPDATE: In a comment, J. Fisher provided a link to a response from Procter & Gamble about the spelling of UNSTOPABLES: 

Downy chose the word "Unstopables" to embody the playful and feisty spirit of the new product's unique form. The name puts a spin on the word "unstoppable" similar to how Unstopables puts a fresh twist on your laundry! However, Downy and Procter and Gamble definitely do not endorse the misspelling of the word "unstoppable" in daily usage.

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TechCrunch brings news of AngelPad, a mentorship program for web-technology startups. The companies selected for the program receive $20,000 in initial funding and another $100,000 from “two mystery VC firms.” A bunch of businesses have been presenting their pitches this week. Most of their names are boring and amateurish (SourceNinja, Prizzm, IDoneThis). One of the names, however, is baffling and amateurish: Vungle. Ditto the company’s self-description (reproduced verbatim):

Previously, mobile apps have had to rely on text and banner advertising, unable to show the user what the app does; and as a result doesn’t result in active users.
Vungle is 15 second mobile video clips, becuase [sic] the users see what the app does, installs acquired via our ad format result in four times as many active users.

The company is based in San Francisco and London, two cities with large populations of fluent English speakers and writers, something you’d never deduce from that copy. (As a result doesn’t result …? Sheesh.)

So I’m guessing the V stands for video and the -ungle has something to do with … jungle? Sorry, but all I’m getting is fungus, fumble, bungle, and linguine alle vongole, with unpleasant overtones of Tungle, a name I still dislike.

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In another TechCrunch story I read about another bad name, Adlibrium Dailies, which distributes daily deals through mobile applications. If this name is meant to evoke ad lib (short for ad libitum, Latin for “at one’s pleasure”), it ain’t working, because it sounds exactly like “add Librium,” a very well-known antianxiety drug. (If you click the latter link, you can watch a “phobias slideshow.” Fun!) Adlibrium is brought to you by Camber Tech, itself a not-bad name: camber means an arched surface or a setting of automobile wheels. But the creativity seems to have run out there. Besides Adlibrium, Camber has also developed Snapify (one of too many -ifys; read “A Disturbifying Trend in Namifying”) and Chatisfying, which is even more disturbifying: I originally read it as Chasti-fying (making people chaste?) or Chasten-fying (scolding people?). Even as it’s meant to be read—chat plus satisfying—it’s terrible. Portmanteau names: so tempting, so challenging.

The Headaches of War

Advisory to everyone who hasn’t yet completed today’s New York Times crossword puzzle but intends to: you may want to stop reading this post now.

Here’s today’s 10-Down clue:

Trademark forfeited by Bayer under the Treaty of Versailles

“Bayer,” “trademark,” and “forfeit” were all the clues I needed to know the answer: aspirin, a famous case of genericization. What I hadn’t known were the circumstances of the forfeit.

Aspirin was originally compounded in 1853 by a French chemist, Charles Frederic Gerhardt, from salicylic acid, sodium salicylate, and acetyl chloride. The result was acetylsalicylic acid. Gerhardt didn’t market his formula, and it wasn’t until 1899 that a German chemist working for Bayer, Felix Hoffman, rediscovered it. (That’s the official story; a Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrün, later claimed that most of the work at Bayer had been his, and that his contributions had been expunged by the Nazi regime.)

Bayer patented the drug and trademarked the Aspirin name, which it synthesized from the a in acetyl chloride, the spir in spiraea ulmaria (the plant source of salicylic acid; common name “meadowsweet”), and –in, a common suffix for commercial medicines. Aspirin was originally sold in powder form; the first tablets came on the market in 1915.

Then came World War I. After Germany’s surrender, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles exacted war reparations that included Bayer’s forfeiture of the aspirin trademark in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Russia. (It retained its trademark status in Germany, Mexico, Canada, and 80 other countries.)

Aspirin wasn’t the only trademark that became a generic term in 1919. Bayer also owned the trademark to an opiate drug it had named Heroin. The legal rights to that name were among the spoils of war, and “heroin” has been a lower-case generic ever since.

Heroin, “the sedative for coughs.” Date unknown. Source.

 

Naming Notes

Pfizer’s exclusive patent rights to Viagra begin to expire next year, and the pharmaceutical company is taking what you might call prophylactic measures. This month the company will introduce generic Viagra in New Zealand under the name “Avigra”—an anagram of “Viagra.” “Avigra will be a fascinating experiment in branding and pricing strategy,” writes Bnet’s Jim Edwards, “and rival companies will observe it for clues as to how to compete when generic Viagra comes to the U.S. and other large regional markets.” Pfizer has also introduced a chewable form of the drug, Viagra Jet, in Mexico. (Hat tip: @AHundredMonkeys.)

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Preparing for its initial public offering, the real-estate website Zillow, founded in 2005, last week applied for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker symbol “Z.” If it’s approved, it will be the first one-letter Nasdaq symbol, but not the first use of “Z” as a stock symbol. That distinction used to belong to Woolworth, the five-and-dime chain that went out of business in the US in 1997. The New York Stock Exchange has almost an alphabet’s worth of one-letter stock symbols; here’s a list. (Pandora Media has applied for P, which was last used by Phillips Petroleum.) Related: “Ticker Shock,” my 2006 post about about the value of a memorable ticker symbol.

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Ford Motor Co. asked its 1.4 million Facebook fans for help in naming a new Mustang V6 performance package, and more than 3,000 of them went to work. The winning submission, “Mayhem Mustang,” came from Jeremy Marler of Charlotte, North Carolina. Unlike some companies that turn to crowdsourcing, Ford had the grace to compensate the winner: Mr. Marler will receive a three-year lease on a 2012 Mustang equipped with the Mayhem Mustang Package. (Hat tip: @WordLab.)

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Why is a telephone jack called a jack? “With all the making and breaking of connections, switch-pins wore out quickly. An early improvement was a hinged two-inch plate resembling a jackknife: the ‘jack-knife switch,’ or as it was soon called, the ‘jack.’” —The Information, by James Gleick.

Names in the News

Why is the Libyan military operation called “Odyssey Dawn”? Josh Dzieza explains in The Daily Beast that the names of military operations are governed by regulations that dictate their length (two words), their tone (they can’t “express a degree of hostility inconsistent with traditional American ideals or current foreign policy”), and their legality (no commercial trademarks). Dzieza points out that the war formerly known as Operation Iraqi Freedom has since last year been called Operation New Dawn (I wrote about that name change here), and he interviews linguist Geoffrey Nunberg and two namers from Landor Associates for their perspectives. (Via @wayword.) (Read my other posts about military jargon and naming practices, including the rather popular “Beyond Snafu and Fubar.”)

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More Odyssey Dawn: Wired.com quotes a US Defense Department spokesman who says the name is “just the product of the Pentagon’s semi-random name-generation system.” The US Africa Command, or Africom, was given three sets of words it could begin the name with; the words begin “between the letters JF-JZ, NS-NZ and OA-OF, and those three groups give about 60 some odd words,” the spokesman said. Read more at “What’s in a Name? ‘Odyssey Dawn’ Is Pentagon-Crafted Nonsense.”

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Zeum, the children’s art and technology museum in San Francisco, will change its name later this year to Children’s Creativity Museum. When Zeum opened in 1998, it aimed for tech-y hipness, starting with the name, a truncation of “museum.” But according to a San Francisco Chronicle story, the clever name was an obstacle. “Research showed folks outside the tech circles just didn’t know what it meant,” said the museum’s executive director, Audrey Yamamoto. “My parents still don't know how to pronounce Zeum. They always say Zoom,” said Stanley Lin, a local high school senior who’s an intern at the museum. The new name, logo, and exhibit plan were all developed by local agencies that donated their time; the blandly descriptive name was contributed by business-consulting firm Bain & Company, not generally known for its verbal-branding work.

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The Coen brothers’ film-production company, Mike Zoss Productions, is named after Mike Zoss Drugs in Minneapolis, where the brothers liked to hang out when they were kids. The Farrelly brothers say they don’t know why they named their production company Conundrum Entertainment: “It’s a real head-scratcher.” Those and 32 other explanations of how production companies got their names are in the March issue of Vanity Fair. The story is titled “What’s in a Name?” because, as we have seen, that is the only permissible title for stories about names and naming.

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NZT—the fake productivity-enhancing drug taken by Bradley Cooper’s character in the new thriller Limitless—is shorthand for the equally fake yet very scientific-sounding thallanylzirconio-methyl-tetrahydro-triazatriphenylene. According the TheClearPill.com, an authoritative-looking website that launched last December to generate interest in the movie:

NZT is a nitrogen-based psychotropic that impacts specific brain activity in several ways but most significantly by elevating receptivity and synaptic sharing between the hippocampus, the amygdale [sic] and the striatum.  In controlled doses, taken over the course of a relatively short period of time, NZT significantly improves both short-term and long-term memory, memory capacity, and the analytical purposing of memory.  Because it also impacts the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, NZT can improve higher brain function, hand-eye coordination, muscle memory and even the body’s immune system.  In some people, NZT can even induce lucid dreaming and what is sometimes called ‘fugue state’.

NZT is “not recommended for vegans.”

(Speaking of The Clear Pill, “Clear” is used in Scientology to refer to a desirable state on the road to personal salvation. According to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, “becoming Clear strengthens a person’s native individuality and creativity.”)